Black lettering tattoo on an upper arm reading To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Quote tattoo on the upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo on the outer upper arm, set in four lines of plain sans-serif lettering. The text reads To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all, with the lines centred and evenly spaced over smooth skin. The background is a grey fabric sleeve and the image is lit by indoor light.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Fenn had taken the back room on the second floor the summer the pier burned, and in all those years I never once saw him hurry. He came down at seven for his egg, read the tide table as though it were a letter from someone he didn't much like, then walked the groyne and back. He paid on Fridays in an envelope with my name spelled right, which is more than most manage.

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The trouble started with a postcard from his sister in Leeds, a photograph of her grandchildren squinting on a beach. He propped it against the teapot and said nothing for an hour. When I went up to strip his bed I found a little book under the mattress, its cover soft as bread, full of pencil ticks beside lines copied out by hand. One was underlined twice: To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

I stood on the landing holding his sheets and felt an anger I hadn't felt since my husband died. Twenty-six years I had kept this house, polishing brass for lodgers who never asked my name, existing as carefully as he did. So I went down and told him Mrs Hollis was taking the back room for the sea view. It was a lie. He laughed, properly, for the first time in my hearing.

He left on the Saturday tide with one suitcase and the little book in his coat. No postcards since. But I leave his window open now, and when the wind comes up Marrow Street from the harbour it riffles the guest ledger on my desk, and I have started, God help me, making my own ticks in the margin.